"Brookmyre, Christopher - A Big Boy Did It" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

'My personal favourite is "Don't let the awkward squad fire over me",' Lexington said, his tone somehow commanding without sounding stern. 'And I don't intend to this morning.'
'Come on, sir, it's a bit bloody cryptic, isn't it?' appealed Rosebud.
'Oh you think that's cryptic, do you, Willetts? Well let me assure you, that's the clear part. Captain?'
Shephard looked around his audience again, even more discomfited than before, plainly unused to needing anyone to bail him out.
'I'm afraid the Commander is right. The nature of the ambush indicated that General Mopoza knew well in advance of Thaba's intention to jump ship. This begs the questions of how much else he knew, and when he knew it. The permutations are frustratingly abundant. Did Mopoza also know Thaba was trading on information about a planned terrorist attack? Did he even feed Thaba this story in the first place because he suspected a betrayal? Did Thaba bolt because he had been cut out of the loop, hence the scarcity of his information? Like everything else in Sonzola, it's one big morass of double-crosses.
'In a military analysis, I find it almost incredible that Thaba was evacuated from the ambush, so there remains the possibility that Mopoza let him get away, knowing or
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not knowing he was fatally injured. In short, we don't know whether Thaba's information was genuine, whether Mopoza knows what we know, or even whether Thaba made the whole thing up to buy his ticket.'
'So, with all respect, sir,' Rosebud asked, 'what has any of this got to do with us?'
Shephard looked to Lexington, who dismissed him politely with a nod and said a quiet 'thank you' as the soldier sat down.
'To answer that question, Superintendent, let me introduce Mr Eric Wells of Her Majesty's Security Service.'
Child Molester sprang up eagerly. He looked like he ought to be even more nervous than Shephard about facing the room, but probably lacked the self-awareness. Maybe just as well, given the nature of the crowd. After the support act's frustrating performance, the headliner was really going to have to deliver.
'I can't shed any more light on the questions Captain Shephard posed/ he said quietly, prompting immediate requests from all round the room that he speak up. She'd seen the type plenty of times before, an overflowing fount of information, but used to being tapped by a maximum of about three people at once.
Wells coughed a little, then resumed, his voice more projected but still not carrying particularly well. She estimated he had about thirty seconds to grab them by the throats before he'd be lost in a flood of impatient mumbling. Thirty seconds would be plenty, though, if she'd guessed right about his area of expertise.
'It is possible that General Thaba's information is as worthless as it is vague, in which case I am now wasting everyone's time. I sincerely hope that I am wasting everyone's time.'
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The last remark cut dead a dozen sarcastic mumbles. Wells had more stagecraft than she'd thought, though he did have heady material to work with.
'General Thaba may have been delirious, he may have been dying, and he may even have been lying, but he mentioned the Black Spirit. That is what it has to do with you, officer, and that is why you've all had to come here this morning. The possibility we are facing is that one of the world's most dangerous and ruthless terrorists could be planning his first strike on British soil.'
A smattering of scornful tuts and sighs grew into a wider undercurrent of discontented mumbling. Lexington stayed put, significantly less protective of the wispy Wells than the SAS man. That significance, however, remained lost on most of the assembly.
'It's hardly grounds for a national alert, is it?' said one, a dumpy wee bloke she recognised from a placement she'd done in London last year. Hart, his name was, and like many in the big city he was used to a more tangible terrorist threat, with specific times, locations and codewords, not this airy-fairy bollocks.
'Not yet,' Wells said flatly, an unmissable admonition in his tone. 'But if it gets to that stage, then you're going to be very glad you paid attention to the speccy bloke from MI5. Because make no mistake, this is not just another homicidal fanatic with a shedload of Semtex, howling at the moon. The Black Spirit is a whole new species. He is a contract terrorist: you give him money and he kills people, that's the deal. He doesn't have a cause, he doesn't have an agenda, he doesn't have a leader, he doesn't have a sponsor and he doesn't have anything that could possibly ever be mistaken for a conscience. He does it because he gets paid, and believe
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me, his services are in demand, because he is very, very good at it.'
Wells was fairly warming up now, banging out the goods with an undisguised relish. He'd been surprisingly unruffled by the early heckling, and her guess was that this was because, like most obsessives, he was obliviously confident that his audience would share his enthusiasm once he reached the meaty part.
'He first flashed on to our radar screens just under three years ago, when he blew up the American embassy in Madrid. You may remember that responsibility for the bombing was claimed by Islamic militants. In truth, they merely paid the piper. The Black Spirit played the tune. The audacity of the attack was, analysts believe, intended as an overture, and the theme of high civilian casualties has remained central to the symphony. As well as gutting the embassy of the self-pronounced "most powerful nation on Earth", the explosion also demolished a cinema in the adjoining building, killing forty-eight people. They were watching the film Close Action 2, which for those of you lucky enough never to have seen it, is about an elite US anti-terrorist unit. The timing of the blast was not thought to be coincidental.'
Wells could now have reverted to his previous quieter tones if he'd wanted. In fact, he could have whispered. Little chance of that, though: he was having way too much fun.
'Since then, his CV has included the sinking of the Black Sea cruise-liner Twilight Queen, the deputy Prime Minister of Georgia among the eighty-one dead; last year's poison- gas attack in Dresden, which claimed fifty-five victims, and January's St Petersburg railway disaster, in which he effectively turned a passenger train into a moving bomb then derailed it through a Russian army base. The death toll for
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that one broke the three-figure mark. And these are only the ones I'm allowed to tell you about. He's been responsible for others, but his involvement in them remains classified.'
A hand went up amid the hush. It was Willetts, he of the Rosebud remark. He wasn't looking quite so jovial.
'How do you know these were carried out by the same guy?'
'Oh, he makes sure we know. He leaves us a sign, a, ehm, calling card, you could say. Like most terrorists, he's very protective of his work. He's not giving anything away, though, he's not stupid. It's his way of identifying the ones he wants us to know were his. We're certain he's carried out others anonymously, and if we could match him up to those we might get a better glimpse of his identity. The problem is, there's sixty terrorist incidents around the world per month, on average.'
'And what's the sign?'
'I'm afraid that's classified too.'
Groans echoed round the room. Lexington was right: cops hated secrets. They weren't missing much this time, though; she had seen the Black Spirit's little territorial piss- stain, and there was nothing mysterious about it. The reason it was classified was so that they could be sure when they were looking at his work, which helped to join a few dots; even if, as Wells admitted, they were only the dots he wanted them to join. If the signature became common knowledge, then every bampot with a bomb could spread it around to claim second-hand kudos and cloud the picture.
'Why is he called the Black Spirit?' Hart asked, unknowingly skirting the answer to Willetts's question. 'Can you tell us that much?'
'It's just a name,' Wells lied.
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The reason wasn't important, but Wells didn't want to get their backs up further by telling them that that was classified too. It was verboten because it referred to the also classified signature: a crude, line-drawn, almost shapeless black blob given a face by two white ovals and an oblong grid of grinning teeth. It had generated a number of similar nicknames - the Dark Phantom, the Grinning Ghost, the Black Ghoul - but 'the Black Spirit' had been the English rendering that stuck around Interpol. Wells had stumbled when referring to it as a 'calling card', afraid he was giving something away. This was because that was exactly what the cheeky bastard left behind, printing the image on dozens of white business cards, which ended up blowing around the bodies and debris afterwards.
'Well, no, in fact it's more than a name,' Wells revised. 'At least, it has become more, and that's been his design all along. This individual has gone from obscurity to being one of the most wanted terrorists since Carlos the Jackal in the space of three years. And the explanation for this meteoric rise is not that he's the best, the baddest or the most prolific, though he's in with a shout at all those titles. It's because he has, effectively, marketed himself. I said he was a new species, and I didn't mean just because he kills for cash. This isn't merely contract terrorism: this is designer-brand contract terrorism. The reason he leaves his mark on his most high-profile works is so that his notoriety grows. So for your million bucks or whatever he charges, you don't just get your terrorist atrocity, you get your terrorist atrocity with the Black Spirit label attached. And as his notoriety grows, so does the marketability of that label. The bad guys know they can trust him to deliver, and the good guys shit themselves when they hear the name.'
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Or cream themselves, as seemed a growing possibility in Wells's case.
'Normally, that kind of exposure works two ways. The downside of waving it in everybody's face is that you're increasing the risk of being fingered. Not this guy. He's been operational for three years and we know next to nothing about him. We don't know what he looks like. We don't know what nationality he is. We don't know his age. We don't know his associates. We don't know his intermediaries. We don't know his aliases. We don't know anything that's going to give us the slightest chance of identifying him if he gets on a plane and walks through immigration at Heathrow.'
The grumbling began to resume, but it had a very different edge to it now. It had changed from the impatience borne of not believing they were needed, to the discomfort of not believing there was much they could do anyway.
Millburn's hand went up, and all eyes fell on him, perhaps hoping his question would expose the threat Wells had built as merely a house of cards.
'How do you know this Black Spirit is one man? If you've no descriptions, couldn't it be a group, a gang?'
It was Wells's turn to look impatient. Though he had an answer for it, he obviously hated this question. He didn't like it when the children threatened to stop believing in Santa Claus.
"That possibility was considered for a while, yes. There is absolutely no doubt that he has collaborators, but people in this line of business tend not to operate on a democratic basis. No matter how tightly knit the group, someone has to be calling the shots, and the Black Spirit's exploits have been nothing if not egotistical. We also have . . . some
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intelligence: second-, third-hand accounts of, well, variable veracity would be the euphemistic way of putting it. People saying they heard this or met that person who heard someone tell someone else . . . You know the deal. Terrorists and their associates are no different from other criminals in that they will either tell you nothing or tell you lies, but now and again there's the occasional inadvertent titbit dropped among the garbage. Anyway, for what they're worth, the accounts are consistent on enough points to confirm that they are talking about an individual. Unfortunately it's an individual nobody ever claims to have met or even seen.